A clerk with the Southampton Telegraph Office, Charlie Deacon was only 16 when he played in the Young Men’s first-ever game in 1885. And he was one of the “phenomenal juniors”, as the local press put it, who won the Hampshire Junior Cup in three consecutive seasons from 1887-88 to 1889-90, playing in all bar two of the 17 matches that this entailed, invariably at right-half. In the next two seasons, he was at centre-half for the eight matches that it took to win the Hants Senior Cup twice and to contest two Finals, the first of them successfully, for the Hants CCC Charity Cup. He had by now been rebranded by the press as “the old warhorse”. Yet he had won all of those medals by the age of 23. There would be no more medals – or games, even – for Charlie. He died of a brain tumor the following year.